Justice and Her Brothers —
Virginia Hamilton
Justice Cycle, book 1

I
am continually surprised at the depth and width of my ignorance. Case
in point: Virginia Hamilton, an award winning author
who was previously unknown to me. I got to be one of yesterday’s
lucky ten thousand; now you can be too [1].

Like
most adolescents, Justice Douglass—“Tice” to her parents and
friends, “Pickle” to her brothers Thomas and Levi—has to deal
with change. In particular, Justice finds herself resenting her
mother’s late-blooming college career. Each hour her mother invests
in schoolwork is an hour less for Justice and her brothers.

It
eventually becomes clear that Justice is worrying about the wrong
thing. She should be paying more attention to her twin brothers.
Thomas and Levi are mirror twins. They may look alike, but one is
right handed, one left, one is a leader, one a follower, one is a
victim and one … one is a monster….

The
summer rolls by in its dusty way. The brothers busy themselves
organizing something they call the Great Snake Race. It gradually
dawns on Justice that she doesn’t really understand her brothers or
her relationship with them. There is something odd and unpleasant
about them, about their interaction with each other, with their
family, with their neighbors. Justice slowly begins to grasp just how
dysfunctional they are.

For
that matter, there’s a lot that Justice doesn’t understand about
herself. She is lucky to have a neighbor, Leona Jefferson [2], who
realizes that Justice has hidden, unusual abilities and has some idea
how to help the young girl access and control them. Leona cannot
follow where Justice will eventually go, but she can at least point
the way.

The
twins also have abilities. Thomas in particular has a gift, a gift as
great as Justice’s. As great but far darker…

~oOo~

Like
Justice and her initial misunderstanding of the phrase “Great Snake
Race.” I too have been in situations where phrases that clearly
had one meaning turned out to mean something completely different
[3]. It’s like there’s a playbook out there some people don’t get to read.

The
author does a nice job of inexorably ratcheting up the tension as
Justice begins to notice all the weird crap going on around her—to
realize that what she took to be a completely mundane world isn’t. At
the beginning of the novel, we might be reading a pleasant
coming-of-age story set in a quiet, dusty summer. By the end, we’re
biting our nails.

I
often research a novel and its author before I read it, but in this
case, I didn’t. I didn’t even look at the copyright date. Because I
got this through interlibrary loan, an ILL tag covered the
characteristic Leo and Diane Dillon cover,

Despite
inadvertently denying myself the period clues [4], I still picked up this
book’s very 1970s vibe.

Justice
read almost as though the author set out to write a juvenile analog
[5] of Octavia Butler’s Patternist
novels (of which I have only reviewed Wild Seed ,
although like most people I have read all of the Patternist
books). There are definite differences, most striking of which is
that the African-American community in this is a rural one, whereas
the Patternist books are either urban or post-apocalyptic. While I have no
reason to think this and the Patternist
novels are
set in the same universe, they very easily could be.

Because
the cover of my copy was obscured by the ILL tag, I also failed to
note that this was Book One of the Justice
Cycle.
I read this as a standalone. Although it functions well enough as a
standalone, the ending is a little abrupt. Now that I know there are
sequels, I am very curious to see how the series developed.

2:
Leona is almost as ominous as Thomas. I found a little Leona went a
long way. Actually, I would have preferred less Leona and more
Justice. It would have been more satisfying if Justice had been able
to work out what was happening and what to do about it, all on her own.

3: And it runs in the family. I once I had a long and very confusing conversation with my grandmother when I told her I came back to the car because I got a little bored and she wanted to know what sort of board it was. This is just one reason why written communication is superior to spoken.

4: Strictly speaking, the cover isn’t a clue. The actual 1970s edition had a Dillon cover but it was a different Dillon cover.

The edition I got, from the 1990s sure looks like it is from the 1970s, though.

5: This isn’t so much because this book is all unicorns and rainbows;
there are definitely shadows here. It’s more that Butler’s Patternist
books are extremely grim.